COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: A very apple-worth teacher

School starts tomorrow. Today, families will be frantically scavenging store shelves for their last-minute school shopping. Spiral notebooks, No. 2 pencils, apples. Do people still do that? I can't recall bringing an apple to any of my teachers. Ever. Not one.

It's not like I haven't had great teachers. Out of the 100-plus teachers I've had in my academic career, I've certainly had plenty of apple-worthy teachers. Although I'd have to say that my all time favorite teacher, the most apple-worthy if you will, was a teacher that technically wasn't even my teacher. In fact, I was 25-years-old by the time I stepped foot into Mrs. Sobilo's seventh grade language arts class.

I started my tenure with the city of Eureka as a recreation leader at Zane Middle School. My first day at Zane, I remember being a little over-confident (ok, ok, I was arrogant). At that point in my career I had worked with youth involved in the juvenile justice system and gang members in New York -- I could handle a bunch of seventh-graders right?

Middle schoolers are a very interesting breed. Part veteran kid, part rookie adult. Discovering their potential, as well as their hormones. Individually trying on different identities while attempting to blend in collectively. Testing the limits of absolutely everything, simply because they have learned they have the ability to do so.

Now, take all of those factors and stick this group into a classroom for 50 minutes and tell them to be absolutely silent and focus on their homework. By the end of my first day, I was ready to run back to the loving arms of the gang members.

Luckily, I had been placed in Mrs. Sobilo's classroom. She recognized my ability to connect with the kids, and subtlety helped me develop that skill. She encouraged me when I made great connections, swooped in and saved my butt when the kids took over, and overall helped build up my confidence. By the end of the year, I left the classroom each day knowing that I had made the most out of the 50 minutes I had in these kids lives. I may not have been a student at Zane Middle School, but Mrs. Sobilo was my teacher through and through.

I remained at Zane for almost three more years before going on to oversee the after-school programs as the recreation coordinator. There aren't a whole lot of tricks that I've passed on to up-and-coming recreation leaders at Zane that don't owe some debt to my time in Mrs. Sobilo's classroom.

Earlier this year, I popped into Zane to congratulate Mrs. Sobilo on being nominated for the Stagecoach Legacy Award. When I arrived, she was in the middle of talking to a student from her last class who had rushed back in with a question.

After the conversation ended, Mrs. Sobilo approached me, exhilarated, like she had just run a marathon. Her eyes beamed as she clasped her hands and explained that the student had been struggling with understanding a concept in her class, and at that very moment the student "got it."

While I know for a fact that Mrs. Sobilo was very honored by the award she was nominated for, and eventually received, nothing I could have said about it would have given her as much pride as that interaction with her student. It was teaching in its purest form.

Tomorrow, kids throughout the community will meet their new teachers. Teachers, like Mrs. Sobilo, who day after day, year after year, give as much energy and effort to the kid in the front row in first period as they do to the kid who trickles back in after the last period to ask just one more question.

For those of you doing last-minute school shopping, maybe think about swinging by the produce aisle on your way to those No. 2 pencils.